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Well they didn't screw up their controller either. That's shouldn't be a worry, but in the face of everything else, yeah, good on them.

A few days ago I was talking with my brother who works at 2K Games. He's been working with the dev kits on both systems these past few months. I was surprised when he told me how much he hates the sticks on xbone controller. He said they felt flimsy and thought they might break during intense gameplay. He had nothing but praise for the PS4 controller though.

A few days ago I was talking with my brother who works at 2K Games. He's been working with the dev kits on both systems these past few months. I was surprised when he told me how much he hates the sticks on xbone controller. He said they felt flimsy and thought they might break during intense gameplay. He had nothing but praise for the PS4 controller though.

Re-hee-heeally? What did he own/was his preference this gen?

Edit: THe rubber on first xbox controller literally cracked off the thumbstick.

I tell yeah, I was shocked when he kept gushing over how much he liked the PS4 controller.

As someone who's judgement is currently impaired because he has to justify his $400 purchase to himself, this pleases me greatly.

Edit: Speaking of bias, apparently the guy who got the early Xbox One and got banned from Live informed everyone that Ghosts is not playable without an internet connection. So while the console level DRM is gone, its spectre still remains.

Occasionally. He is rarely on xbox live nowadays. (As with most of the people on my friend list.) All my local friends have jumped ship over to the PS3 these past couple of years. I'm assuming they will be upgrading to a PS4 soon.

the PlayStation 4's camera / mic array can only interpret a handful of relatively basic voice commands. The console can't be "woken" while in standby mode by voice, for instance, nor can you command a video playing on Netflix to pause. In fact, at launch, none of the third-party apps on the PlayStation 4 will allow for voice commands -- something Sony reps tell us they "hope" more apps will integrate in the future. The console can be turned off using voice, and you can command it to open games.

I seem to recall another game (wasn't even DLC) that was only 2 hrs long yet people loved. Something about magical holes and an evil computer. I think it even got a sequel!

Portal launched as part of The Orange Box ($50) in a bundle with Team Fortress 2 and Half Life 2: Episode 2. You also got the original Half Life 2 and Half Life 2: Episode 1, although most people probably had them if they were interested in the box. there was moaning about that as well at the time, that they had to pay $50 for three games instead of five. Portal has since been given away numerous times, including to any new Steam user at the time of the Mac launch. In this case, it's one short piece of DLC for $15, and it's still only "Episode 1". It seems excessive for what you get.

The new Mac Pro has up to 30 MB of cache inside the processor itself. That's more than the HD in my first Mac. Somehow I'm still running out of space.

Noted bastion of MS money Polygon released its Ghosts review and the results are... hilarious

The two versions look nearly identical. Viewing the Xbox One release next to the PS4 , I had difficulty telling them apart. It's possible that the PS4 version looked somewhat sharper, but that may have just been my imagination after confirming the hard resolution difference.

Legitimately, the PS4 has slight framerate drops compared the X1 version, which doesn't surprise me as the power differential between 720p and 1080p is much wider than the gap in power between the two consoles. I was left wondering why one of them was at 900p, as that would have made the gap more reasonable.

All right, time to throw in a game and see about this mandatory hard drive installation that’s a feature of every PlayStation 4 game. Of course, it wouldn't be a Sony system if I didn't have to install a system update with the very first disc I put in. Yes, the system isn't even out or connected to the Internet yet, but it still made me copy and install firmware version 1.06 from the disc before I could even install Killzone (Day One players that download the 1.5 version of the firmware won’t have to do an additional install… but still). The firmware update took a few minutes of un-multitaskable file copying, installation, and resetting. You know the drill if you’ve ever used a PS3.

When I came back to the freshly reset system and tried to launch the game, I was a bit surprised to see an installation progress bar that was already about two-fifths complete. It seems that the system automatically started copying the disc data to my hard drive before I even launched it (I was able to confirm this in further tests).

That's a nice, user-centric touch that shows Sony seems to care about getting players into the game as quickly as possible despite the installs. From the moment a disc first hits the system to the moment it starts to load, the whole install process lasts anywhere from 10 seconds to just under a minute, depending on the game. Once the game launched, there was sometimes a few more minutes of additional installation before multiplayer modes were ready to go, but for players launching a single player game for the first time, the process was barely noteworthy.

The PS4 team in Japan is figuring out the best way to implement the missing media features, Yoshida said: "We didn't really think about MP3 or CD. We thought, 'We're going to do that eventually ....' It caught us off-guard. People don't really talk about these features, right? Some people get really mad and [say,] 'I'll cancel my pre-order!' So as we speak, people in Japan – the system guys – are discussing when we can put these features in."

The first issue was reported by Kotaku editor Stephen Totilo, who claims: "The first retail PS4 we got from Sony didn't work".

"In the past week, my Kotaku colleagues and I have used one pre-release PS4 and three retail PS4s with no problems. I've also heard from fellow gaming reporters who've used their PS4s with no problems.

"But the first retail unit that Sony provided me failed to work when I plugged it into a TV in Kotaku's office. A colleague and I were able to compare it to a second PS4 that did work and we found that the issue was rather simple: the bad unit had a faulty HDMI jack that we couldn't fully plug an HDMI cable into.

"It may not have contributed to the issue, but ours stopped working the morning after we updated to version 1.50. Furthermore, IGN tried a wide variety of methods to correct the issue: new HDMI cables, new inputs, new TV, putting a disc into the system, connecting it to and from the Internet, and, of course, holding down the power button during boot-up for seven seconds to try to reset things. Nothing worked. Oddly enough, we tried adding light pressure to the top of console and it briefly flickered a few active home menu images on the television."

Anyway the reason I bring it up is some people have been hinting that something Banderas-related might occur at the official launch tonight, and honestly if that happens I'd be immeasurably impressed that Sony was paying enough attention to integrate a meme from a gaming forum into the festivities as a wink of approval at their enthusiasm.

Anyway the reason I bring it up is some people have been hinting that something Banderas-related might occur at the official launch tonight, and honestly if that happens I'd be immeasurably impressed that Sony was paying enough attention to integrate a meme from a gaming forum into the festivities as a wink of approval at their enthusiasm.

If it happens.

Alright...that would be incredible.

Tretton and Yoshida have consistently proclaimed that the PS4 is the amalgamation of all the true Sony fans' requests, so that could be an incredible cherry atop the proverbial sundae.

My PS4 finally shipped this morning (well is slated to be shipped. According to UPS they haven't picked it up yet). Delivery set for MOnday, since UPS doesn't deliver on Saturdays. I'm thinking if it gets to the UPS facility by quitting time today, I'll try and just pick it up there tonight.

Sony has urged fans to be patient while the US and Canadian PSN experiences issues following the launch of the PlayStation 4.

A number of new PlayStation 4 owners have contacted IGN saying they're encountering the error numbers NW-31453-6 or NP-3500-8, along with text explaining "The network connection has been lost".

Sony responded to the issue on its support site and through Twitter. Though the response has been removed, as you can see below it explains that an extremely high number of people are trying to log on and download firmware 1.50 for their new console.

I'm hoping P visits this thread soon to answer a question for me. I've bookmarked a 2.5" 1TB 7200 rpm SATA III drive on Amazon, but I'm wondering if there will be any issues since the PS4 uses a SATA II drive out of the box. I've read that SATA III is backwards-compatible, similar to that of USB 3.0 to USB 2.0, but I'd much prefer to hear the opinion of someone that knows what they're talking about.

Also, will the 7200 rpm drive generate more heat? Heat seems to have been the only thing that killed my original PS3 after several years.

I'm hoping P visits this thread soon to answer a question for me. I've bookmarked a 2.5" 1TB 7200 rpm SATA III drive on Amazon, but I'm wondering if there will be any issues since the PS4 uses a SATA II drive out of the box. I've read that SATA III is backwards-compatible, similar to that of USB 3.0 to USB 2.0, but I'd much prefer to hear the opinion of someone that knows what they're talking about.

Also, will the 7200 rpm drive generate more heat? Heat seems to have been the only thing that killed my original PS3 after several years.

the PS4 has an extra 2Gb of DDR3 RAM, a system teardown by iFixIt has revealed. This extra 2Gb – that’s really 256MB, 2 Gigabit rather than 2 Gigabyte – is suspected to be used for background processes on the secondary processor.

People suspect this is for the streaming/game capture, and it's how the PS4 can do 15 min and isn't as juddery as the X1s. Well played, Sony.

My friend who live here camped out at the nearest Walmart this morning and picked up a PS4 with Black Flag and FIFA. I won't be able to check it out until tomorrow morning, but I'm excited to see the interface in person.

The PlayStation 4 version of Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag currently outputs natively at 900p, Ubisoft has revealed, with a future title update set to offer full native 1080p visuals.

In an update on the UbiBlog, Ubisoft communications manager Gary Steinman explained that "players will need to download a title update (available shortly after release) to enjoy the full 1080p native resolution.

"The team then used the time between the ship date and the release to focus on a title update that could deliver native 1080p resolution on the PS4."

The update also introduces a "brand-new anti-aliasing technique" that will offer "an even cleaner, clearer and more brilliant moving image".

I'm hoping P visits this thread soon to answer a question for me. I've bookmarked a 2.5" 1TB 7200 rpm SATA III drive on Amazon, but I'm wondering if there will be any issues since the PS4 uses a SATA II drive out of the box. I've read that SATA III is backwards-compatible, similar to that of USB 3.0 to USB 2.0, but I'd much prefer to hear the opinion of someone that knows what they're talking about.

The standard is very clear: They are completely compatible in both directions. In practice this doesn't always mean that it works (try using an SSD with a Sandforce 1200 controller with Intel's latest 8-series chipset, for instance - fails because the old Sandforce drive doesn't follow the standard completely) but even that should not be an issue here. Both consoles use standard AMD south bridges this time around, so it should even be a standard SATA controller that has shipped in a few million PCs already. It's of course possible that Sony has somehow managed to mess up the driver, but there is no increased risk from going with SATA III over SATA II.

Also, will the 7200 rpm drive generate more heat? Heat seems to have been the only thing that killed my original PS3 after several years.

Yes, but only marginally - 2.5" drives run extremely cool these days in general. If you're worried about heat, make it a habit to clean out the vent grilles regularly instead - that's what usually kills electronics.

The new Mac Pro has up to 30 MB of cache inside the processor itself. That's more than the HD in my first Mac. Somehow I'm still running out of space.